How to get your website ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 30 minutes

It’s crunch time. The final countdown to Black Friday and Cyber Monday is on, but is your website ready?

We know you’re busy.

After all, you have Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday and Cyber week to prepare for; your time is precious. That’s why we created this guide to help you get ready to just 30 minutes.

And by 30 minutes, we mean 30 minutes.

In the same time it would take you to watch an episode of “The Office,” you could find ways to make your website (and sales) irresistible to your customers.

But first…
Before we get started, it would be highly encouraged to use a website analytics tool like Lucky Orange. Whether you use Lucky Orange or not, the features we are talking about today such as:

Heatmaps

Session recordings

Form analytics

Website live chat

Polls

Conversion funnels

Setting up and getting used to these tools before Black Friday or Cyber Monday maximize your options during the holiday season. Speaking of which, this holiday season is going to bring an incredible amount of sales opportunities to your e-commerce store.

Want to learn more about the e-commerce website trends this holiday season? Check out our complete, 50-page guide here. You’ll learn the strategies, actionable insights and best practices to help you get more sales and more leads to end the year in the black.Now, on to the checklist!

30 minutes to a better website

With BFCM just weeks away, cramming hours upon hours of analysis and potential improvements is the last time you have time for. We get it. If you have 30 minutes, you can get your website in tip-top shape for your holiday shoppers.

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Your first three minutes: Behavior tags

Before you do anything, set up behavior tags. These are “tags” you apply to certain traffic sources, UTM parameters or webpages.

10 minutes: Watch visitor behavior

Visitor behavior is really at the core of your website. People are so much more than just a pageview, and analytics technology gives you the features to explore what they are really doing on your website.

Through heatmaps and session recordings, you can examine behavior such as:

How different traffic (such as campaigns) interacted with your website. Start with heatmaps and segment the data by behavior tags or source to show specific campaigns. You can segment further by geographic location, number of visits and device type.

Where people clicked on your main navigation and drop-down menu. Your navigation menus are easily among the most essential parts of your website. What works for your desktop users may not work for your mobile users. Start with a click heatmap and segment it to specific device types and behavior tags to see how people really use your navigation. If you use Lucky Orange’s dynamic heatmaps, you’ll be able to also see visitor data populated on drop-down and hove-over menus.

Whether your call to action (CTA) is effective. Instead of assuming that a click on a CTA means it’s working, take a closer look. Use a scroll heatmap to see if people are even reaching your CTA. Next, analyze what happens after the CTA was clicked – use form analytics to follow up with your lead generation form or watch session recordings to see why more people aren’t converting.

What nonlinked elements are being clicked. Check your heatmaps to see where people on your site are clicking. Follow-up with session recordings to see if the links are properly working or if the image/content has never been linked.

Watching and monitoring visitor behavior can take as much time as you put into it. If you’re under a time crunch to get everything set for BFCM, dedicate just 10 minutes to get a quick look at where you could improve your layout, links and design.

Content is also typically easier to update than major website design issues and drive more conversions during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Eight minutes may not sound like much time to evaluate your content, but it’s a good place to start. You can look on the surface for quick-wins and easy-fixes. As you get more time, dive deeper into detail when you get the chance.

A few things to consider:

Look at your scroll heatmaps. If there’s a large drop off between areas of the page, you either have a fantastic CTA or you need more content to help the visitor want to keep scrolling. This goes for both blog posts and product pages. For long-form blog posts, look at how far people are reading to evaluate whether or not your audience responds better to short- or long-form posts.

Reorganize your FAQs. Using click heatmaps, identify your most popular and most clicked questions. Move those to the top of the FAQs and expand on them if needed.

Focus on your product descriptions. Click heatmaps can help show you what words people click (desktop) or tap (phone and tablet) on. Clicking on nonlinked words could mean they are interested in your content or are confused.

4 minutes: Analyze your forms

Last but certainly not least, spend a few minutes investigating your forms. Whether you’re looking at a lead generation or checkout form, you need to spend a bit of time examining how people use your form.

Are there specific fields with a high abandonment rate?
Do people complete your form in a different order?
What fields take the longest to complete?

Using a form analytics tool, you can find all of this information about your forms.

What you may find is that the answer isn’t necessarily removing fields that have a high abandonment rate or longer completion time. You may need to make those fields optional, adjust the field validation rules or explain how you use that information.